Streams

Selected Shorts: What is Real?

Sunday, April 29, 2012

On this program, appearances are deceiving in stories about apartments and neighbors.

“
It had been his idea, not hers, to take a run at the door after nothing else worked. When it burst open and they had found themselves face-to-face with each other, they had both felt it, the sense of something unexpected surging up, rising right through them. It was just a matter of surrendering to it.

— James Lasdun, “A Woman at the Window.”

Our first story, “A Woman at the Window,” by James Lasdun, could be considered a cautionary tale for men who want to rescue damsels in distress. London-born Lasdun now lives in upstate New York. The reader is cabaret artist Leenya Rideout, whose credits include featured rolls in Symphony Space’s political cabaret The Thalia Follies.

Next, an extraordinary story about a man with a shape-shifting apartment, by the Ukranian-born Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, who died in 1950. Krzhizhanovsky created philosophical, satirical, and fantastical tales that ignored the Soviet government mandate to portray the state in a positive light, and for this he remained unpublished for decades. This story, “Quadraturin,” about the changing, evolving dimensions of its hero’s living space—and his mind—and is read by author/actor David Rakoff. Rakoff is the author of the collections “Fraud” and “Don’t Get Too Comfortable,” and “Half Empty.”

This program concludes with the winner of the 2010 annual Stella Kupferberg Short Story Prize contest, which asks writers for original short shorts on an assigned topic. The assigned subject was “neighbors,” and Deborah Joy Corey’s winning entry, “Flight,” was inspired by her neighbor, an Alzheimer’s sufferer. Corey was born in Canada, and lives in Maine. “Flight” is read by Leenya Rideout.

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